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Monday, July 14, 2014

The Joy of Prosody: The Joy of Rhyming!

By LizMastin

The Joy
of Rhyming!

The poetic conversation has been “non-stop”
concerning rhyme and whether it is passé in this day. However in his book Writing Metrical Poetry by William Baer,
many famous poets have argued strongly in favor of rhyme, among these are poet
George Santayana saying, “Like the orders of Greek Architecture, the sonnet or
the couplet or the quatrain are better than anything else that has been devised
to serve the same function; and the innate freedom of poets to hazard new forms
does not abolish the freedom of all men to adopt the old ones.”

Edgar Allen Poe
said, “Contenting myself with the certainty that music, in its various modes of
meter, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in poetry as never to be
wisely rejected – is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly
who declines its assistance – I will not now pause to maintain its absolute
essentiality.” Robert Frost stated: “Writing free verse is like playing tennis
with the net down.”

A Little Poem

Poems needn't rhyme

All of the time.

But if they do,

That's okay too. - Anonymous

Of
course most of the famous English poets used rhyme and meter, among these
Shakespeare, Pope and Donne, but times have
changed greatly, and as always, unless rhymed poetry is done correctly it
will fall under scrutiny! For instance, using what is called “forced rhyme” is
considered particularly grievous, for a poet should not use a rhyming word
“just” because it rhymes. The rhyming word should further the idea of the poem. It may mean adjusting a line’s
phrasing to make the chosen idea-word work well for him.

Here are some
types of rhymes taken from “Rhyme – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”:

Masculine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the final syllable of the words:

rhyme

sublime

Feminine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the second from the last syllable of the
words:

picky

tricky

Syllabic: a rhyme in which the last syllable of each word sounds the same but does not necessarily
contain stressed vowels:

Cleaver

Silver

Slant Rhyme (Imperfect – Near – half): Slant rhyme, known also as half-rhyme or
imperfect rhyme , refers to words that have final matching consonants and almost
rhyme (farm, yard) or appear to the eye to do so (said, paid). “Many poets use
slant rhyme to introduce an element of the unexpected and prompt their readers
to pay closer attention to words themselves rather than the sounds of words.” Emily Dickinson, for example, pairs “soul”
with “all” in one of her poems. She was a prominent pioneer in slant rhyme.

*Slant rhymed
words appear to be of one syllable.

Assonance: words (within a line) having matched
vowels

The horse coursed through the
field.

Consonance: words having matching consonants

The robbers
had rabies.

Semirhyme: a rhyme with an extra syllable on one
word

Bend – ending

Weak Rhyme: A rhyme between a pair of one or more unstressed syllables. Unlike syllabic
rhyme, the pair of words will contain differingnumbers of syllables.

hammer – carpenter

Among those using rhyme and metrics
today are rappers, songwriters, metrical poets, and there are those of us who enjoy
writing both metrical and fee verse. In free verse, cadence takes the place of
counting stresses (feet), and rhymes normally appear as internal rhyming,
assonance, consonance and alliteration.

1. In the poem
below: You will find syllabic rhyme
in “dizzy” and “easy” in the first stanza; “breath” and “death” constituting a masculine rhyme.

2. In the second
stanza, “pans” and “countenance” form an example of weak rhyme and “shelf” and “itself” form a semirhyme.

3. In the third
stanza, “wrist” and “missed” is masculine
and “knuckle” and “buckle” form a feminine
rhyme.

4. In the fourth
stanza, “head” and “bed” is masculine and “dirt and “shirt” are also masculine.

My Papa’s Waltz

By Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on
your breath

Could make a
small boy dizzy;

But I hung on
like death:

Such waltzing
was not easy.

We romped until
the pans

Slid from the
kitchen shelf;

My mother’s
countenance

Could not
unfrown itself.

The hand that
held my wrist

Was battered on
one knuckle;

At every step
you missed

My right ear
scraped a buckle.

You beat time on
my head

With a palm
caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me
off to bed

Still clinging
to your shirt.

LIZ MASTIN BIO

LizMastin is a poet who lives in
Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho during the summer and Bullhead City, Arizona
in winter. She thrives on the study of the great poets, their biographies, the
schools of poetry to which they adhered, and the poetic conventions of the
times in which they lived.

While she enjoys free verse as well as metrical poetry, her
main interest lies in prosody. She notices that most of the enduring poems are
those we can remember and recite. Liz enjoys poetry forms such as the sonnet,
the sestina, the couplet, blank verse, simple quatrains, etc. and she hopes to
see modern poets regain interest in studied metrical poetry.

Liz is currently putting together her first collection of
poems which should be completed this winter. The poems are a mixture of
metrical and free verse poems.

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